Add another town pair of lovers. Or two.In post 5, Mathdino wrote:
Lot to dig into here. To start off, I would argue that there's little value in NOT claiming your lover on Day 1, and it seems like everyone who's played this game has done the same. If anyone has a strategy for this that involves not claiming, do tell.
So if everyone does claim (with scum dividing in 2 and claiming 2 pairs), that makes this essentially a 2:4 Nightless White Flag setup with 6 non-consenting hydrae.This makes the setup extremely unfun. Furthermore, any given townie has only 5 other "slots" to sort.
As played normally,this setup is scumsided. In theory, White Flag means scum can't bus. In practice, scum just runs each other up to L-1 all the time and claims they're totally okay with bussing. Scum's ideal strategy is to distance their pairs as much as possible (or at least treat each other as town). Doing so almost completely removes town's ability to scumhunt. Plus, since the game ends after 2 mislynches,most towns will screw up. This setup is unforgiving.
However, FURTHERMORE,this setup has a breaking strategy. Literally random lynching creates a 60% winrate for town. Why is the actual town winrate 36%? Because in reality, lynches are not random, and scum's high volume of players means they can control the narrative much better. Just one town lover pair not voting for scum is a loss for the other 6 townies.
Now if lynches were random (which people say is against site rules but I can't find this), you'd get 60%, but suppose the town agreed on a single lover pair as a town king (to just decide or dice roll 2 lynches). This leads to a winrate of 70%. Town's optimal strategy is just to find one pair that's being townish and have them roll 2 lynches. Done.
I recently won this setup by reading a low-experience lover pair as newbtown and then sheeping their RVS vote the entire game. Lucked out and we won. When correct play as town is to leave everything in the hands of chance,this is even more unfun for the players involved. You could argue "well don't do that", but then that punishes players playing to win.
Fixing this:
One player from that game said they were trying to rework it, but I don't think this is salvageable. I don't think this setup should run again, and the majority of players from that last game agreed.
The issue is simply numbers as far as I can tell.
This isn't going to fix this from being a fairly boring setup though.